Blog Switching!

Please follow me to a new website for this blog - http://laurencamp.com/whichsilkshirt — where I'll continue chasing after exquisite language and remarkable poetry.

There's still so much to cover.

Unpacking the Suitcase: The Poetry of Kay Ryan

"A poem should act like an empty suitcase."      — Kay Ryan

The other night, I sat in the third row at our largest auditorium, listening to U.S. Poet Laureate Kay Ryan read. Her measured, little poems could go by in an instant and you'd only be left with the sound of a few words on your tongue. She was aware of the audience's limited attention spans and the brevity of her poems, so she reread a few (as much, I think, for her benefit as our own). 

The man who introduced her, Atsuro Riley, also a poet, and clearly enamored of her words, used the word "thinky-ness" to describe her. Truly, this is a poet who needs facts to make the trip worthwhile. Bit by bit, she removes the contents of what we think we know of an old saying, an observation or a cliché, and replaces them with what she calls "recombinant rhymes" (slant rhymes and internal rhymes, not end rhymes), puns and deep insight. She giggles. She said "goody." She likes jokes and she likes Emily Dickinson.


Yes, I said those in the same sentence. This is a complicated poet, one that makes us work and wonder, even as we're getting excited about the simple fact that we're going on a journey.


Speaking of suitcases, Riley asked Ryan to end with this glorious poem: 

How Does a Guy Write So Many Wonderful Poems?

For tomorrow night's radio show, Charles Simic's poetry will be on my lips. Surrealist artist Joseph Cornell's magnificent boxes led me to Simic's poetry. The image above is one of Cornell's boxes. Dating from 1945, "Untitled (The Hotel Eden)," is assembled from various precious objects and found fragments. That's what Cornell was all about - collecting the unusual. Simic wrote a book of poems, loosely interpreting Cornell's boxes, and also collecting the unusual. That small book, Dime-Store Alchemy, published in 1992, is a delight.

Simic was deeply influenced by the absurd and dark days of his childhood. He grew up in Yugoslavia in the lap of World War II. His poems can be as bleak as a Russian winter, and yet sometimes they are giddy with strange things. This is the way of people who come through wars. They can have a strange sense of center. The poems thump in places you wouldn't expect, and touch in places they probably shouldn't. As he says in his newest book, Master of Disguises, "…Making everything very quiet in my room. / I thought I heard myself cry for a long, long time."

Tomorrow's "Audio Saucepan" radio show (April 17) is "The Headstrong Ways Episode.” I'll be reading the poems “Summer Storm” by Charles Simic (from Master of Disguises, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt); "Flow Chart” by Elizabeth Willis (from Address, Wesleyan University Press); and “Trade Deficits” by G.C. Waldrep and John Gallager (from Your Father on the Train of Ghosts, BOA Editions, Ltd.).

There's a wonderful interview with Simic in The Paris Review. It's a good place to learn more.

"Audio Saucepan" is a one-hour weekly journey into poems, philosophical fragments and literary excerpts intermixed with music from across the globe. The show airs Sundays, 5-6PM (Mountain Time) on Santa Fe Public Radio KSFR 101.1FM with simultaneous access via the internet at www.ksfr.org. Please tune in!

What Does the Fish Have to Do With Anything?

Want a really good example of an object poem? Read Elizabeth Bishop's "The Fish." Her descriptions are vivid, and her cold eye tells you everything you need to know about the caught fish. She describes his lip as "grim, wet, and weaponlike," and oh, how I love the tight, metallic sound of "the sun-cracked thwarts, / the oarlocks on their strings."

I share her marvelous poem with my students only after they've completed Steps 1 and 2 of the Object Poem exercise … and we discuss it, turning the words around and around, figuring out the "hooks" and the "catch," but most of all the "victory."


The Fish 
by Elizabeth Bishop

I caught a tremendous fish
and held him beside the boat
half out of water, with my hook
fast in a corner of his mouth.
He didn't fight.
He hadn't fought at all.
He hung a grunting weight,
battered and venerable
and homely. Here and there
his brown skin hung in strips
like ancient wallpaper,
and its pattern of darker brown
was like wallpaper:
shapes like full-blown roses
stained and lost through age.
He was speckled and barnacles,
fine rosettes of lime,
and infested
with tiny white sea-lice,
and underneath two or three
rags of green weed hung down.
While his gills were breathing in
the terrible oxygen
--the frightening gills,
fresh and crisp with blood,
that can cut so badly--
I thought of the coarse white flesh
packed in like feathers,
the big bones and the little bones,
the dramatic reds and blacks
of his shiny entrails,
and the pink swim-bladder
like a big peony.
I looked into his eyes
which were far larger than mine
but shallower, and yellowed,
the irises backed and packed
with tarnished tinfoil
seen through the lenses
of old scratched isinglass.
They shifted a little, but not
to return my stare.
--It was more like the tipping
of an object toward the light.
I admired his sullen face,
the mechanism of his jaw,
and then I saw
that from his lower lip
--if you could call it a lip
grim, wet, and weaponlike,
hung five old pieces of fish-line,
or four and a wire leader
with the swivel still attached,
with all their five big hooks
grown firmly in his mouth.
A green line, frayed at the end
where he broke it, two heavier lines,
and a fine black thread
still crimped from the strain and snap
when it broke and he got away.
Like medals with their ribbons
frayed and wavering,
a five-haired beard of wisdom
trailing from his aching jaw.
I stared and stared
and victory filled up
the little rented boat,
from the pool of bilge
where oil had spread a rainbow
around the rusted engine
to the bailer rusted orange,
the sun-cracked thwarts,
the oarlocks on their strings,
the gunnels--until everything
was rainbow, rainbow, rainbow!
And I let the fish go.

Prompt 3: Write about an Everyday Thing

Close up photo of an Atlantic Halibut taken by Thomas Laupstad.

For the Word Play class this week, I brought my students a box of objects: a pine cone, an egg, a flashlight, some rubber gloves, etc. The goal was to find a way, through a 3-step process, to turn their simple objects into poems about life and statements of humanity.

One of my students picked the egg (brown, hard boiled). For the first step, she wrote a thorough clinical list. She discovered that the skin of an egg is not entirely smooth, but "coarse like sand pebbles." She described the shape as a cameo, and she noted its hidden "luscious core."

The great thing about an object poem is that you don't have to start with a blank page. Because you begin with a description of an egg or a glove or whatever you've chosen, you get to find your way into the poem slowly.

So, here's how you do it:

The Internal Journey: Two Books - Part 2 Fasting for Ramadan

Fasting for Ramadan, a book by Kazim Ali
that explores the rites of the Arab ritual

In the last post, we discussed artist Anne Truitt's Daybook, a journal that takes a critical look at self and meaning through language. 

Another book that's landed on my desk recently is Fasting for Ramadan (newly released from Tupelo Press). This book is also a chronicle of time passing and daily activity, but it is written by an accomplished poet, Kazim Ali, and focuses on religious ritual and abstinence. 

More structured than Daybook, Fasting for Ramadan takes the reader through each day of the 30-day rite, often reporting morning and night. Because this journal (or essays, as it's called) was originally written as individual blog posts, it has the feel of being spoken to a reader, the feel of a dialogue, the feel of currency, a sharing of thoughts.

Again, the work is a pleasure to read. Ali says,"my fast today is entirely personal... the moon is in the sky…" and "To eat is a gift. Hunger points you to it." I appreciate how he tells me so simply, and how true it is.

I want to read the book because I have never experienced such an extended fast. I want to read to know where the mind goes when you cut off the body's nourishment. I want to read for the imagery and the stillness, for the uncertainty and the power. 

And I want to extrapolate from his experience to my own. How would I manage this ritual, this hunger, this time?

The Internal Journey: Two Books - Part 1 Daybook

Pith, 1969 — a minimalist sculpture by Anne Truitt,
who shared her process and her worries in a glorious book, Daybook.

Daybook chronicles Anne Truitt's journey as an artist over a period of seven years -- beginning in June, 1974. She had just been honored with two retrospective exhibits of her work at major institutions: the Whitney Museum in Manhattan and the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. 

Suddenly cast in the public eye, she lost track of herself. This book is a journal of her reactions to the attention, and of using writing as a way to deal with the anguish of self.

How Herb and Dorothy Find the Best

Adorable, huh? Indeed,
but these two have an internal sense of trust that is enviable.
Now if we can just translate their message to poetry…

The other night I watched a documentary on Herbie and Dorothy Vogel, a couple who have amassed a stellar collection of minimalist and conceptual artworks on a very small budget. What did it take? Dedication. Passion. Belief. They look and look. They never give up.


That little Herb, cute as a button, studies each artist's work with ferocity. He wants only the pieces that speak directly to him. It's heartening to see that sometimes he prefers the rejects to pieces with monetary value. And Dorothy, too, enters each studio, gallery, exhibit, with her own eagle eye. These two are sharp with color, and brave about concepts. No one tells them what to like, or what's worthwhile. They know what they want.


The movie is about art as a force of expression with human value, rather than art collected as a commodity with economic value.


And this is true of poetry.

Poetry Prompt 2 - Begin with a Quote

Using a quote can help open up your focus.
Poet Margaret Randall, also a sensitive photographer and world traveler,
has practice looking through other lenses. 

My friend, the poet and activist Margaret Randall, created a stunning book several years ago using quotes as prompts. Where They Left You for Dead includes the words of Adrienne Rich, Joy Harjo, Paul Monette, Audre Lorde, Eduardo Galeano, Linda Hogan and many others. 

After the quote and attribution, Randall springboards off, moving us out of the quote. Each quote helps her to find the deep ends of life. 

Let's consider this quote by Audre Lorde, included toward the beginning of the book, "I could slip anchor and wander / to the end of the jetty / uncoil into the waters / a vessel of light." 


Randall shoots off from those words into a poem about watching her partner suffering in pain, "You say you are / leaving yourself behind. A sort of death (you watch / my face) but not in this dimension, a different recipe / for dying. Pay attention now. ..."


What a wonderful approach to the blank page, and what a way to honor words you love! Find a  beautiful quote (or one that disgusts you, even... this, too, could lead to some intriguing writing..). Then, jump off. Don't worry about landing for a while; just swim around in the words — yours and the other writer. See where you can travel, how far from shore you can swim. 

John Cage, Noise and the Spaces for Poetry

The sheet music for this notorious composition
is basically blank white space, but Cage
"composed" those empty sounds.

"Wherever we are, what we hear is mostly noise. When we ignore it, it disturbs us. When we listen to it, we find it fascinating."

— American experimental composer John Cage 

(from The Future of Music: Credo) 

By the end of each week, the noise of our lives can often accumulate to an absolute din. The rushing about, the 9 to 5 schedule, appointments, traffic, news headlines, television, the endless emails, the shoulds. 


John Cage knew a thing or two about finding inspiration in the spaces and chances around him. Best known for a 3-movement noteless composition called 4'33"- which sounds almost exactly like 4 minutes and 33 seconds of silence, Cage knew that even silence has fascinating messages to impart. 


In that "performed" composition, the silence is not just silence, it is silence about sound. It includes the noise of our lives, the sounds of which John Cage carved out for us to hear in a quieter place. 


Listen as you go about your days and weeks, and you'll find intriguing bits of poems all around you. This is how I end up with poems based on news stories, tutoring poems, persona poems.


When you pay attention to someone else, you're being given a new story to tell, another perspective. You get to step outside of yourself.


So, listen at a doctor's office, the subway stop, the dog park, the grocery store, or as you're walking through the neighborhood in the early morning. What you hear is so much more than noise. It's an opening, and could make a wonderful poem.

Punctuating a Poem - Part 2

, . ; - : / : - ; . ,

When tutoring college students enrolled in English classes, I describe punctuation as a road map. It helps us readers find our way in a sentence or a paragraph. I explain that a period tells us to stop fully and look both ways. If there's no punctuation, we keep right on going. A comma is more of a rolling stop (the kind we all do at certain corners).

But, whether we're talking creative writing or academic essays, I encourage every student to pay attention to his or her pauses by reading out loud. I reason, "Where you pause, you'll want your reader to also pause, right?" 

As a creative writer, how you choose to do this is up to you. You could insert a comma, a line break, or some other funky, unexpected symbol (a slash, a dash, etc.). You are setting the rules.

But, once you set those rules, just as with a form poem, stick to them. If you put a comma in one place, a line break in another, and no symbol still further along, you will have asked us to detour from the place we're trying to get to - the meaning and feeling of the poem. 

We will be lost in the lines of the poem.  It will be like reaching a dead end in an unfamiliar city.

My advice on punctuation is to do what feels right to you in the piece you're writing. Just maintain that choice all the way through that last line.

Earlier Post: Punctuating a Poem - Part 1

Rewriting Greek Tragedy in Poetry

Theaterwork's Company of Poets generated the words written
on the set of the upcoming play Antigone.

I've been part of a collective for nearly a year now. This is the second theater performance we've worked to enhance with poetry. We began meeting in November, writing from prompts and Jean Anouilh's play Antigone, which premiered in the early 1940's. 

That play was based on Sophocles' original treatment of the Greek myth. Oedipus' daughter buries her brother who has been killed by her uncle, her mother's brother, and in turn, her life is forced to an end. All in all, a sordid story expertly told.

The Company of Poets, as we're called, has been actively exploring the words and themes of the play - writing it into new directions. We will be publishing a chapbook of some of the works we've created, entitled "Other Antigones," and reciting our work before some of the performances. We'll also be doing an event specifically focused on poetry - ours and others - that derive from the many arguments and concerns that arise from the play.


Did I mention the play itself is in a reclaimed city pool? That's what you're looking at in the photo above. Theaterwork has gussied up a 12-year vacant pool. The show opens this Friday. 


Our main poetry performance is still a few weeks off. 

“Antigone” Poetry Performance in collaboration with 

Theaterwork’s production of Jean Anouilh's play 

Company of Poets: Anne Valley-Fox, Jenice Gharib, Angela 

Janda, Lauren Camp and Ann Hunkins

333 Montezuma Annex, Santa Fe, NM

April 24, 7PM

Punctuating a Poem - Part 1

In class the other night, one of my students asked about punctuation. He thought he'd like to write poems without commas because he wasn't confident of punctuating correctly. Rather than get it wrong, he figured it best to leave the little suckers out. Another student added that commas at the end of lines feels excessive. After all, she reckoned, the line break already tells the reader to pause.

Punctuation is a huge topic, and a drag for many people. Rather than turn a perfectly wonderful creative writing class into an exacting punctuation lecture, I offered my hard rule of consistency: Whatever you do, keep doing it throughout the poem.

Next post: Punctuating a Poem - Part 2

Lucky to Be Local

Putting your words out into your community is a way to "keep it local."

I recently received the second issue of The Más Tequila Review. It's a substantial endeavor, undertaken by an Albuquerque poet with an MFA in creative writing and no job to support this journal. It's a hefty, but not slick, publication. A labor, a love, a publication with guts. 


Richard Vargas, the man behind this, is just one of many New Mexicans creating new journals. Here are a few other journals, with links, and their tireless editors, determined to get our words out.


New Mexico Poetry Review - Kathleen Johnson
Malpaís Review - Gary Brower
Adobe Walls - Kenneth Gurney
Santa Fe Literary Review - Miriam Sagan


I don't know where you live, or what journals are available in your area, but I want to encourage you to send your poems to local journals above all others. There is something intensely satisfying about being with your peers, your friends, poets in your area that you admire. 


It feels necessary and honorable to be allowed to put your voice in places near your house, to let it reach into backyards and parks and coffeeshops that you love, into the sky and the trees, into the ethereal center of your world. 


These journals, these editors and their teams, are the ones that can help you make that happen. 

What Tiger Mending Has to Do with Poetry Analysis

A painting by Amy Cutler entitled "Tiger Mending"
on view at SITE Santa Fe

In a recent post, I shared a poem by Adrienne Rich called "Aunt Jennifer's Tigers." Someone wrote in asking for insight.... "Why tigers?" 

I believe we interpret poems, and artwork for that matter, from our own history, what we know, and also from what's around us now, our moods, the spaces we find ourselves in.

Lately, I've been hanging around the galleries at SITE Santa Fe, Santa Fe's cutting-edge international art space. I'll be teaching a fairy tale writing workshop there at the end of the month, in conjunction with a surreal exhibit, and I've wanted to fully experience the art.

When I read Adrienne Rich's poem, I can't help but think about Amy Cutler's strange little painting in the first gallery, "Tiger Mending" (pictured above). In the Cutler painting, expressionless women painstakingly stitch stripes back on depleted tigers, as though their concentrated effort will enliven the animals.

As an artist who has worked primarily with fabric and thread, I know all too well that sewing is a gender-specific role, one that is typically considered quiet and demure. The women in Cutler's painting and Aunt Jennifer all seem without voice, stuck in their roles. But that doesn't have to be what sewing is; it has always felt to me quite powerful -- the ability to create something out of stitches. 

From the poem, we know that Aunt Jennifer needs a way out of a rotten situation with her husband, and we know too - from the line "When Aunt is dead, her terrified hands will lie / Still ringed with ordeals she was mastered by," that she'll never get it. 

For Aunt Jennifer, embroidering those tigers, and making them "prancing, proud and unafraid," is her only way into a better life. In that fantasy place, she is golden and formidable, surrounded by a wide vista where she can roam freely. The two-dimensional tigers she's drawing on her canvas give Aunt Jennifer what little resilience and power she has. 

No wonder she is sewing on their stripes.

How I Found James Magee's Poems

Photo of The Hill by Tom Jenkins.

One evening this week, I spent some time studying the photos in a book called The Hill. The book showcases an isolated, secret artwork in the rocky, barren desert of West Texas. The artist, James Magee, has spent 25 years creating four buildings, connected by causeways. He works, it seems, with a religious fervor and unending perserverence.

The stone work grew as a poem does, rock by rock, word by word, moment by moment. The interior installations, so striking in photos, are dense with symbolism.

Toward the end of the book, I found pages of what looked like poems. The Hill website explains these "poems": On occasion, while visitors take the considerable time required to study the works, Magee will recite their “titles”— in effect, lengthy poetic texts, at once allusive and immediate.

This intrigues me. For years, I wrote poems to accompany my artwork - until finally I separated the two mediums. I always wrote when the work was finished as a way to enlarge what I had created with my hands. I wanted viewers to "see" the work in yet another way. Sometimes the poems elucidated; other times confounded.

If you want to know more about The Hill, a fascinating, little-seen site, or its artist, check out the article in Granta magazine.

Audio Saucepan, Edgar Allen Poe and James Magee

I've been compiling music and poems for tomorrow night's radio show. All week I've been listening to new jazz and old Appalachian sounds. There's a slight element of creepiness to the show, but Poe's words will always do this, and there's the ever-present unexpected...

Along with broadcasting "Annabel Lee," I will be reading one of James Magee's extended "poem-titles" on tomorrow's show. It is, in fact, the source for the title of the episode.

In the next post, I'll give you an earful on Magee, who is an artist and former attorney, esconced in a large-scale, lifetime project. Though not a poet, words have a remarkable place in his visionary artwork.

"Audio Saucepan" airs Sundays, 5-6PM (Mountain Time) on Santa Fe Public Radio KSFR 101.1FM, with simultaneous access via the internet at www.ksfr.org.

Tomorrow's show (April 3) is "The Shameless Promise Episode” and includes the poems “Annabel Lee” by Edgar Allan Poe (from The Essential Edgar Allan Poe, Naxos AudioBooks); “Untitled (Sometimes yes.)” by James Magee (from The Hill, Prestel); and an excerpt from Adam Foulds' epic verse narrative The Broken Word (Penguin Books); along with a wide variety of intriguing and unexpected music.

Please tune in!

Interpreting a Poem - Part 2

Another glorious photo by Michael Nichols.
There is such a dichotomy between the tigers - proud and calm -
and Aunt Jennifer.

In the last post, I showed you a poem by Adrienne Rich - "Aunt Jennifer's Tigers."

Yesterday at the Tutoring Center, where I work part-time to assist beginning level students in everything from grammar and punctuation to literature and essay organization, I had the chance to help an older man, retired military after 30 years, find his way into this poem.

This poor student was completely lost in the words and symbolism. He had no idea where to start. And he was so worried about finding 600 words to say about a 12-line poem that he had gotten a little bit frantic. He told me it was impossible.

He was in a hurry to understand it. And I don't think poems work that way.

I asked him questions, wanted to break it down simply for him…what is Aunt Jennifer doing? He said she was painting. I asked him how he knew that. Well, he didn't. 

I pointed to the word "needle" and asked him to imagine that beautiful ivory needle. Then, he noticed the word "wool." He decided she was making a quilt.

Little by little, we broke the poem apart into bits he could chew on. We talked and talked about the meanings, or possible meanings, of the words. I told him poems take time; they take multiple readings. They take a willingness to suspend your fully conscious, normal mind sometimes.

And, after an hour's conversation about this very poem, the symbolism and word choice, he blithely asked: "But what should I write about?"